Status Report: WGL Grand Finals Mohamed Fadl Q&A

Hello,
got contacted by*play-zine.com, they interviewed the head of WoT E-sports,*Mohamed Fadl, published it on their website and shared it with me for your viewing pleasure.
The interview comes in video form but I passed it into text, it’s not exactly a transcript as Fadl’s English is not very good so I did polished the parts where he was having trouble expressing without changing its essence.

With the introduction of tier 10 tanks, it seems to have revolutionized the game because there is much more diversity than it was before.
We learned that we should not be afraid to make changes. We were afraid that tier 10 would be heavy, slow and that it would become “one shots”. We just thought things without actually trying but now we know, we did it and it was the best change ever, 60% increase of viewer ship staying with us, growing with us, people wanting to see this(WGL). This made us think, maybe we should even think about 15vs15 for high level E-sports. We’ve been talking to the team on how we could make this happen.So there is a possibility of having 15vs15 professional Esports?
A very high possibility.About the WoT RNG on Esports (fact that one player was left alive with very low HP after a bad RNG roll shot).rsr
Thing is, there are always so many values that come together in World of Tanks (damage, penetration, etc), it makes you feel like it’s not fair but then again I can tell you that the other side (other team) is happy about it.It seems like there is a big difference between Russian, EU and other teams in how serious they take this competition. What do you believe causes this and do you think the playing field will be leveled in the future?
It changed a lot in the last years, Russians have the game for the longest, EU, they are very close to RU, they are very much the same. SEA first had nothing then they came back last year and sudently had a crazy performance, this year they even won the Rumble in the pacific, we learned that Asians teams have struggles but they always come back.
Before RU teams were more relaxed but now you see EU, SEA and even the underdog NA catching up and even the champion NAVI knows that other teams wont forgive them a single*mistake.The World of Tanks community is vastly consisted of “casual” players, only very few are*considerate*“hardcore, do you think E-sports will atract them int he future?
The WoT audience is different from any other game audience, we have older gentlemen and if you look outside (WGL Warsaw event) we have a queue for families, other E-sports events don’t have this. We have guys coming with kids on the arms and their wife, we have a different audience and players, these people only play WoT but they are not gamers in the actual sense, they come from work and WoT is the first game they play/played, they are coming to a field they didn’t knew it existed (E-sports and even Twitch livestreams). In the past, gaming was for young people but now suddenly a lot of the older/grown people are joining the group and this is beautiful.*rsr
It’s like a football/soccer match, now you see the kids competing on E-sports and the older guys cheering from their seats.On the fact that you have a VR set to watch the event, do you think VR will revolutionize the way we watch video and videogames?
Yes, it will be a part of the evolution. Its like at the beginning with black and white TV, people were sceptic and then colour came in and they were fascinated, same way nowadays we have flat screens, the internet, etc. The VR is a natural next step and it may look massive/heavy nowadays but tomorrow will be smaller and easier to wear/use, it will happen but its important that everyone is aware of it and all should use it and not be sceptic about it because its beautiful, its normal, its evolution.On VR disconnecting you from actual reality/surroundings.*RSR
It’s normal because what we have is an initial version, in the future the hardware will be smaller and more simplistic and we may be able to look at our surroundings as well.